1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatuses, and computer program products for provisioning aggregate computational workloads and air conditioning unit configurations to optimize utility of air conditioning units and processing resources within a data center.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One area that software is being used is in the controlling of energy consumption of computing systems. In particular, energy consumption has become a critical issue for data centers, triggered by the rise in energy costs, volatility in the supply and demand of energy and the widespread proliferation of power-hungry information technology (IT) equipment. In data centers, myriad integrating physical components such as power distribution units, power supplies, water air conditioning units, and air conditioning units interact not just with one another, but also with the software components, resulting in a management problem that is both qualitatively similar to and quantitatively harder than that of managing computer hardware alone.